Well, once again my Ruby on Rails talk, "Unified Modeling
Language on Rails: From Diagram to Web Site in Record Time", has been accepted for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference, so sometime between June 10 and June 14, I'll be presenting in Orlando. I don't have the date yet -- they'll let me know after 2/28, apparently -- but I'm excited, so I thought I'd let anybody know might care know. :)
This was a fun experience last year, so if you're going to the converence, stop by and say "hi"! Or let me know and maybe we can get together.
A company I know has discovered that all of the sites it built in the late 1990's and early 2000's are vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks, where a malicious user can obtain the contents of the database (or do other nasty things) without much effort. Every single one. I recently found (and patched) a similar problem in Syfy Portal's code. (No, I didn't write it, thankfully, but I could have.)
Turns out that SQL injection isn't the only way to perform this attack.
Good advice here.
When I worked on Special Edition Using Microsoft Word 2007, they gave me a copy of Vista to install, and I really did kind of like it. I still have it installed, anyway. But I was disappointed that the Does that Ultimate site, which is supposed to have all kinds of extras was not available. Well, apparently is now.Windows Vista Ultimate site with extras launched
Here are a couple of interesting pieces for those of you want to delve into some of the more difficult topics:
Defining SOA as an architectural style
Understanding the Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
Certainly not light reading, but how else are you going to take your skills to the next level?
For months, my installation of Microsoft Word wasn't working, and I didn't have the wherewithal to reinstall it. (Yes, I did have the CDs, just not the patience.) I was pretty sure that it was irrevocably corrupted, and I didn't wanna think about it. So imagine how surprised I was when I uninstalled some garbage I had no use for (half of which I don't even know how it got installed) and suddenly Word started working again.
I'm wondering if it might not be a good idea to look at Virtual PC, now that Microsoft has decreed that it is free, and start installing things that way so they don't conflict with each other. What started me on this? A nice piece about how to test with IE 6 when you have already installed IE 7.
Ever been frustrated trying to decipher somebody's code? Of course you have. Check out Daniel Spiewak's look at Java skill levels. Heheheheh...
When I first started at Site Dynamics (a million years ago, I think) my first action was to insist that projects actually had a specification. I know, I know, I'm a little anal that way. But funny, I just coouldn't bring myself to watch people work on projects for months at a time while the client constantly changed his mind and added features. Silly of me, huh?
Anyway, this morning I ran across a very good series of articles on Painless Functional Specifications. A must read for anybody involved in development in any way.
[UPDATE: Also check out Painless Software Scheduling.]
Yesterday, I confirmed my attendance at this years Microsoft Book Publishing Summit in March -- let me know if you're going! -- so I'm reminded of the work I did for them a few years ago.
I'm especially reminded by The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006. The winner?
"Next generation," with 9,895 uses, followed by over 5,000 uses each of "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use."
The thing is, I remember using lots of gobbledygook on those Microsoft papers, because it just seemed right at the time. (Note that the Client accepted those papers.) But I wonder, how else do you say these things without seeming too casual, another whitepaper crime?
Here's something interesting. I was looking for a quick way to add search functionality to SyFy Portal when I came across the Google Custom Search Engine. You can specify a site or sites to search, including individual web pages -- for which they have the "Google Marker" app -- and you can collaborate with others on a search engine. Very interesting. I think there are community-building advantages here....
I've been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I'm actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody's trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in the world, for the most part, is built by residents, and you can buy and sell these objects using "Linden dollars". What's cool about that? Well, how about the fact that you can buy and sell those Linden dollars using real dollars. Yes, that means that if you make money in second life, you can turn that into cold hard cash. How much cold hard cash? Well, apparently the exchange rate fluctuates, but as far as I can tell, it's about one American dollar to 250 Linden dollars. A lot of businesses are jumping on this bandwagon, but it's hard to tell how much of this is-will go anywhere. Still, it's interesting, and I wonder if there's a living to be made here. I've tried to check it out before, but I've never had the hardware for it. Finally, my laptop has a display it likes, although the environment supposedly is not compatible with a satellite connection. (So far, in the very limited exploring I've done, it's not too much of a problem.)
There is also a lot of talk about the educational component here; today's youth are so focused on videogames, there is a fear he that they would learn better and an immersive and are such as this one. In other words, take for example the Sarbonians, a video game meant to teach economics. Students come from an environment in which there's no scarcity, and in a crash land on an alien world with limited supplies, and they have to make a go of it. Unlike other games with an economic basis (such as Civilization), in this one characters explain why the economic principles are the way they are. Pretty cool idea, if you ask me.
What I also thought was interesting is that Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, is making use of Amazon's new distributed storage solution, Amazon S3. This is an interesting concept in which you upload your content, and they pretty much handling. You only pay for the capacity that you use. They have a compute cloud as well.
Interesting.
I rant about _blank">stupid patents all the time, but mostly because it's very rare that I see a controversial patent that I would consider "non-obvious". Maybe it's because I think about how to do these things all the time, even though I rarely have time to implement any of them. Well, I've finally had it.
I had an idea for a project last year, and it would have been fantastic. I'm not going to tell you what it was, but I can prove it would have been very successful, because I've just found out there's a company doing it, and very successfully. Now, I can deal with that. I didn't do it because I didn't have time.
But they patented it!!! So now, not only am I not the first to do this, I can't even do it at all!!
So that's it. It turns out that while a traditional Utility Patent (meaning just about everything but design patents) is only $380 to file -- more to actually have it issued and so on -- it turns out you can file a Provisional patent application for only $75. Maybe I ought to be doing that with my ideas.
I was an Inventor on 9 patents -- which, by the way, I ALSO thought were obvious, but the company disagreed -- and I remember what a pain it was to put together the application, but by G-d I've had enough!
I thought about this when I was in college, but I never had the opportunity to carry it out. Scientists are working on ways for disabled patients to control a mouse with their brain, or by thinking about moving various body parts: Wired News: Now That's Using Your Brain
Net neutrality, in case you haven't heard, is the concept that all traffic on the web should be treated fairly and equally. In other words, companies should not have the ability to give content from some providers special treatment while degrading (ie slowing down) traffic from other providers. Now Intel backs 'Net Neutrality'. According to this Wired article:
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday voted down an "net neutrality" amendment to a telecommunications bill.
With the defeat in the House, attention on the issue is expected to shift to the Senate, where Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) plan to introduce a net neutrality bill.
Telephone and cable companies have argued that the internet should remain free from regulation, and that tiered service would provide a fair way of funding their build-out of internet capacity to accommodate streaming video and other high-bandwidth traffic. They have emphasized that they don't intend to block any website or degrade any internet service.
Sometimes I think if I didn't do this for a living, I would just get out of programming altogether. I know it's not true, because I'm just hooked on it. But I do get pretty disgusted at all of the turf wars and methodology wars and acronym wars and all of the other wars that go on around new technologies. I just posted a link to a good article that pretty much tells it like it is. Do the simplest thing possible. Period. no more, no less.
This is beautiful. From Boing Boing: Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination!:
First MIT grad John Sununu of New Hampshire said that government mandates "always restrict innovation" and then 82-year-old Ted Stevens of Alaska talked about the iPod he'd gotten for Christmas and put the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol on the spot about whether his proposal would break Stevens' ability to move digital radio programs to his iPod and listen to them in the most convenient way (it would).
[Sununu] pointed out that "we have a whole history of similar technological innovation that has shown us that the market can respond with its own protection to the needs of the artists." And he concluded with one of the most damning depictions of the ahistorical nature of the flag (clip from Congressional RealVideo) you'll hear on the Hill:"The suggestion is that if we don't do this, it will stifle creativity. Well...we have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development...new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation...why would we think that this one special time, we're going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?"
I've just posted an introductory discusion on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). What's itneresting about it is it provides away to get around the cross-domain issues you get when you try to access web services using Ajax. Yahoo's now outputting JSON in a ridiculously easy way, so this is worth checking out.
I've just put together a quick tutorial on using XML-RPC in PHP over on the InformIT XML and Web Services Reference Guide. Very cool, and VERY easy. Definitely going to use this.
one thing I love about the Web is the fact that some of the specifications are right there for you to look at to know how things are done. These days, things are getting more and more complicated, but the specs are still there. Witness Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, explains how applications can tell not so much what you said into that phone application, but what it actually means. I am hereby predicting that in the next 12 to 24 months we will see some public use of audio text analysis. And by public, I mean an application that regular people use rather than an application used on regular people.
The other day Sarah told me she was a bit disturbed because she'd received an email from the FBI saying they'd found that she had visited illegal web sites. Having received many of these fake emails (usually purporting to be from the CIA, interestingly) my reaction was "please tell me you didn't open the file that comes with the email." Fortunately, my wife is saavy enough not to open weird attachments, so all was well, and I told her about the source of these emails: a virus, worm, or scam, take your pick.
But apparently a 20 year old in Germany had a guilty conscience, and when he received a similar email, his first reaction was to turn himself in. Police charged him on discovering child pornography on his computer.
Random House is going digital. The publishing company has witnessed what went on in the music industry, and has decided to beat Pirates to the punchby providing a way to legally access their books electronically.
"The technology was adopted before there was a business model for legitimate sales," [Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House's corporate development unit] says. "That created a fertile ground for piracy, and it became ingrained in consumer behavior."are also worried about plans by an Google & Co. to scan library books and make the content available online. And as an author, I'm in agreement with being concerned.
Technorati tags: publishing | digital | books | Random House | publishers | Google
Just recevied this action alert from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
On Thursday, November 3rd, the heads of the MPAA and RIAA present to the House Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property their plans for the future of digital technology.
For high-definition television (HDTV), the MPAA demands every receiver must have, and obey, the broadcast flag. For new radio technologies, you'll be restricted to recording radio shows for a minimum of 30 minutes, for a maximum of 50 hours. And all analog to digital video conversions will be forced to watch for, and obey, a concealed copy restriction mark.
If any one of these provisions pass, it would be a disaster for you and for innovation.
There'll be no room for open source software here. All of these devices must be "robust" -- welded shut to prevent alteration by their owners.
There'll be no room for innovation without the say-so of Hollywood. And there'll be no fair use copying without breaking the law.Please, please, please, if you live in the US, go to the EFF's site and contact your Congressperson to oppose these bills, and spread the word.
Technorati tags: congress | open source | HDTV | protest | freedom | fair use | copyright
I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but apparently Microsoft is planning a sort of online version of Windows and Office, partially to compete with Google. Here's the full story. I gotta chew on this for a while.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has broken the code that printer companies have put in, causing printers to include a tiny invisible pattern that indicates when the document was printed and the serial number of the printer that printed it. Ostensibly to foil (or at least track) counterfeiters, this deal is troubling for several reasons, perhaps put best by EFF Seniorspace Staff Attorney Lee Tien:
Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters. Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?
Technorati tags: privacy | government | EFF | printers | secret codes
SourceBeat looks interesting. You buy a subscription to a book, and you get 12 months of access to that book. During that time, and there may be additions, corrections, and so on. They also have an early release program in which you can start reading the book before it's actually "finished" without impacting your 12 months. SourceBeat covers open source topics.
Technorati tags: open source
My editor over at InformIT has asked me to produce some ruby content, which is nice, because I'd been planning to learn that anyway. It's just always nice to have an excuse. :-) what's also nicest having a place where you can go to get started without having to figure out where to find everything. Thankfully, Loud Thinking has provided a page for Getting started with Ruby that provides links to everything from the language itself to documentation to tutorials and such. Very nice job.
Technorati tags: Ruby | programming
I just posted some remarks on why I think we're seeing the very beginning of the end for Google.
OK, so in response to claims that Yahoo has indexed twice as many pages as Google, we have A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices, in which the researchers compare the number of results returned for just over 10000 queries and conclude that since Yahoo returns fewer results, it must not have as many pages indexed, and certainly not twice as many.
But as anybody who's tried to wade through useless results has wondered, is more really better? Maybe -- and I have no reason to say this other than speculation -- Yahoo has a better way of choosing results?
Like I said, I have no idea how they decide what to display, and maybe they really don't have all of the pages they say they do. I'm just pointing out a major flaw in the experiment's methodology.
Technorati tags: Yahoo | Google | search | search engines
Some people have a knack for knowing what's coming next. And some work very, very hard at it. O'Reilly is pretty well regarded in that field, and at OSCON, Tim O'Reilly gave some insight into the numbers that help guide those predictions. Interesting stuff.
Technology: trends | technology | Oreilly | open source
The one thing I hate about not running my own server is not having root privileges. It just makes my life a bit more complicated. Fortunately, I can usually get around this little problem. When I started using PHP-Nuke, I figured out how to create my own symbolic links to my own images directory, so I could add new ones. Now I need some Perl modules, and fortunately, you can install without superuser privileges. This article is about installing mod_perl, but of course the concepts apply to anything...
(Oh, and if you can't run CPAN, you can search CPAN and download the packages manually...)
I'd like to draw your attention to a comment I made over on my InformIT blog. More than once I've been burned by a writer from India who plagiarized material. Now I hear that it's common among programmers, too. With increasing reliance on India programmers, are we creating a monster?
Technorati tags: India | plagiarism | culture | piracy
Finally someone who calls it like it is. I've been arguing for years that people are upgrading software just because they can, and not because they need to. Sure, there are people who can benefit from, say, Office's integration with XML. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure they're out there.) But that doesn't mean everybody needs it. Heck, unless I need to track changes, I can usually get by with WordPad. It'd be a waste for me. And it's not just Microsoft, even though people think that's my problem. It relates to any software. You should only have to upgrade if you actually need the new product. It's just that Microsoft is the one that is constantly trying to get people to pay for useless upgrades, so it comes up most often in discussion.
Check this out: Shared Spaces Research & Consulting: Stop! An IT Spending Manifesto
This week I'll be writing about AJAX, which is basically just a set name for the combination of techniques I've been using for years to load content into the browser without having to load a new page. (Only now, it's supported in non-IE browsers, which is wonderful.) One interesting resource I don't want to lose track of: Software As She’s Developed » Blog Archive » AJAX Patterns: Design Patterns for AJAX Usability.
My world is very complicated. I am in a profession (writing) where, for better or worse, some measure of success is given by how many people know who you are. And yet, I really am a very, very private person. I don't, frankly, like anybody up in my business, as they say. Read my work or don't, but leave me out of it. So it was with some measure of disgust and revulsion that I read Dee-Ann LeBlanc's Maureen O'Gara Strikes Again, in which she unceremoniously dumps her volunteer position at LinuxWorld Magazine because they pay O'Gara. Why? Because in their quest to discredit Groklaw's Pamela Jones, O'Gara published the most personal of personal details about her. To give you an idea, she published PJ's address and phone numbers, and that's not the most private of the information.
It's disgusting.
PJ is standing up to O'Gara. Good for her. Now she says that she's being warned that people are talking about her imminent "suicide", which is what apparently happened to someone else in this matter. She tells us unequivocably that if we hear about her suicide, it isn't.
No matter which stand you take on the SCO thing -- which is what is at the heart of the matter -- this is simply disgusting.
Technorati tags Linux | PamelaJones | MaureenOGara | SCO
I'm not for sending jobs overseas, but I have to read this comment on the news that IBM is planning to lay off 10,000 to 13,000 mostly European workers and shake my head. Keep in mind that this person is theoretically American, and English is theoretically his/her first language.
Talk about answering your own question.
In my line of work, I'm constantly looking for a way to grab screenshots. I actually paid for SnagIt!, and I like it, but I lost the activation code about 35 rebuilds ago, so now I'm glad to find Screen Grab Pro, which does much of the same thing for free.
I like all three of the Definitions of an Engineer, including the original:
An engineer is someone who can take a simple idea and see through it to the bottomless pits of messy, complexity that lies underneath.
Apparently Japanese teenages are rediscovering reading with ebooks on their cell phones.
Technorati Tag: cell phones | Japan | books | reading
Here's an interesting thought: Bill Gates Must Go from Keep Trying (via Orbit Now!).
I am now the proud user of a Windows 2000/Linux dual boot system. Not that it was easy, mind you. At one point my 160 Gig drive was reporting that it had two partitions: 82 Gig and 534 Gig. Obviously that was wrong. So Support told me I'd need to do a "low level format" but of course I had no idea how to do that.
So, they told me I needed to download a debug program. I did, then I used it to create a floppy that I could use to boot the machine. Just using fdisk (which was on the floppy, I guess) didn't work, so I had to run the following script:
A:\>debug <enter> -F 200 L1000 0 <enter> -A CS:100 <enter> xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <enter> xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <enter> xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <enter> xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <enter> (80 for hd 0 or 81 for hd 1 ) xxxx:010C INT 13 <enter> xxxx:010E INT 20 <enter> xxxx:0110 <enter> -g <enter> Program terminated normally -q<enter>
NOTE that I have no idea whether this script is particular to the Dell Precision 370 on which I was running it or whether that's the normal way to "overwrite the Master Boot Record with zeros", which is what support tells me that script does.
Definitely a "use at your own risk" kind of thing. Even if it works, the results are a completely blank hard drive. (Well, as far as the OS is concerned.)
Now here's a fun idea. The brain behind "A Consuming Experience", who unfortunatly doesn't have a name anywhere obvious, so I can't refer to it has figured out how to do "Automatic" translation of blog posts. Something to think about...
[Update: That would be a lady named "Improbulus", as I've since been chided. :) ]
Technorati tag: language
After getting some inspiration from Sean McGrath, I've decided to expand the Programmer How-To a little bit, and add tips for those niggling things that people just generally spend hours and hours on. This first one involves Jython and numeric directory names when importing code.
Sean's right, though; if we all documented these things when we figured them out, we might not spend so much time floundering around pulling our hair out.
I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.
OK, it's not really hacking, but TiVo has released the TiVo Home Media Engine SDK, which lets you program your TiVo using Java. The hitch, well, besides the fact that it's not supported by the DirecTV receivers, which is more my problem than a general complaint, there's the fact that "HME applications can not control any of the TiVo DVR’s scheduling, recording, or video playback capabilities."
BAH.
Now live on DevSource -- Creating a GUI Feedreader using C++, Part 1: A No-Brainer Guide to UML: "If you've never used the Uniform Modeling Language (UML) before, it can seem a little intimidating. However, UML is actually not all that difficult, once you get to be familiar with the different diagrams and how they can help you to model and document your project. This article takes you through the process of modeling an application using UML, explaining each of the different diagrams, and the basics of how they work. When you're done, you'll have enough of an understanding of UML to document your own project. You'll also have enough of an understanding to delve into UML's finer points without feeling overwhelmed."
Note that this is also the first article chronicling the development of ChaosCrusher, an RSS/Atom/syndication feedreader that will hopefully do what I want a feedreader to do.
I'm crash coursing on Python right now, and I came across Instant Python. Very cool. Very, very cool.
Oh, and I added the Python versions of Use an if-then statement, and Use a while loop, Use a for-next loop, Output to the command line to the Programmer How-To. Nothing complex, but then it looks like very little is when it comes to Python...
Have I mentioned that it's cool?
I haven't had a chance to really even thoroughly read this yet, much less play with it, but I didn't want to loose it. Apparently you can now "combine interactive advertising with streaming video. Users can actually click on objects within a running video ad to trigger an associated message" with a new product called Shoshmosis. We'll see.
Here's something interesting. Cringely proposes that the Mac Mini is actually Apple's first step into the movie distribution business. I'd have to reprint the whole thing to explain it all, but basically he proposes that Apple is preparing to dominate the pay-per-download HD movie business -- think HD NetFlix without waiting for the mail -- the way it dominates the pay-per-download music business with iTunes and iPod. If he's right, this would actually be pretty cool.
Now if I could only get an HDTV for less than an arm and two legs...
I ran across this interesting quote in an old piece about the infamous backroom deal setting webcasting royalty rates:
Every new technology medium seems to enjoy a delicious moment, between being born as a vehicle for human creativity controlled by no one, into a Pigopolistic advertising channel, controlled by very few.
What's interesting to me is how the web keeps spawning medium after medium for creative expression. As one closes down, another appears. Is this the promise of the web?
Almost a year ago, I wrote about what I want in an RSS aggregator, and now, as I actually write one in C++ (see, I told you I was doing it) I've gone back and found that all of those requests are still valid. And I still don't see anybody doing all of it.
Everybody seems to be talking about Groovy, "a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax." I'm not entirely certain what that means, but I suspect I'm going to have to find out.
Via Ned Batchelder, IBM is releasing 500 patents for royalty-free use in open-source projects. I think we're going to see more and more of a push for open source from IBM this year.
I'd listed a UML tutorial in my last posting, but it was, frankly, awful, so I've removed it. Here's a muc better UML Tutorial.
I'm looking for a phone number for the Jazzy company -- the one that sells wheelchairs -- and ran across the Jazzy open source spell checker, which includes an API you can use in a Java app. Not that I need it right now, but you never know.
Now featured on IBM developerWorks -- Use the GLA with the Log and Trace Analyzer with Release 2 of the Autonomic Computing Toolkit: The GLA and LTA are Eclipse-based tools that enable logs to be parsed for occurrences of pre-defined events, relate those events to situations, and recommend actions based on information in a knowledge base. This tutorial is of particular interest to developers and administrators of applications with dependencies on multiple servers, such as DB2, Apache, and WebSphere. The key lesson imparted here is how to use the GLA to create your own adapter for custom application logs. Additionally, the tutorial introduces the underlying elements of the log adapter process. These low-level enablers of autonomic computing systems are an important contributor to the creation of more autonomic computing systems. This tutorial takes you through an example of how high-level open standards, such as the Common Base Event description, can be incorporated into development and administration functions at a practical level.
Here's a little tidbit for you. Wal-Mart's data warehouse, which includes both customer data and inventory and sales data, has passed the half-a-petabyte mark. And they have just five DBAs. Chew on that for a while.
Jeff Jarvis has a great post on how to explode TV news. Basically, exploit the web by giving in to it. I hope they take him up on it.
Ever needed an old version of a product that's no longer supported? Sometimes it can be next to impossible to lay your hands on, but thankfully, Sun's got a products download archive page where you can download just about anything they've supported at one time or another.
I've usually got a good knick for predicting what's coming next, but now I'm being put on the spot about it. Next week's InformIT guide entry is supposed to be about what I think is going to happen in XML/Web Services/SOA/Grid/Autonomic in the coming year. What do you think?
You may have heard of "linkrot", where the sites you link to gradually disappear, and eventually you wind up with a bunch of links to nonexistant pages. For the past two weeks I've been dealing with "docrot". That's when you try to use an API based on the samples and documentation, but it doesn't work because the code's moved on and the documentation hasn't.
Not a good day.
I've started a new project: the Programmer How-To. The idea of this wiki is that for the most part, the differences between computer languages are all about syntax and vocabulary. I frequently find myself in a situation in which I need to do something but I have to look up that syntax. This site will (hopefully) provide a kind of programming universal translator, where you can look up how to do a particular task in a particular language. It's also my first public wiki, so I'm hoping to get some participation...
Here's an interesting thought, from an interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil:
Yes, folks, according to a Harris Poll, fishing is still more popular than the Internet. The poll surveyed adults on their leisure habits, and as usual, the top three were "reading (35%), watching TV (21%) and
spending time with their families and children (20%)". Numbers four, five, and six were "going to the movies (10%), fishing (8%) [and] computer-related activities (7%)", making the oh-so-addictive internet less popular than fishing.
Of course, this is a survey of leisure activities, so it doesn't take into account all of the time spent surfing at work. But then, consider how many adults can just turn on the computer when they get home every night; going fishing is typically a major event.
A little bit of a reality check.
My son's been messing with my computer again, and as part of my cleanup procedure I always check Windows Update. Today I find just one Critical Update, but it just amused the heck out of me: Remove unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font.
Unacceptable symbols? I ran through it in Word and didn't see anything objectionable, unless you want to consider "h" as a double-headed sperm. Maybe the Oriental characters mean something nasty.
But still, a "critical" update for this?
Whatever.
I don't often point to Microsoft, but here's a quick guide telling you how to Create a Project plan in 5 easy steps. Most of it may seem obvious, but I've been a bit surprised lately at how many people have trouble with it.
It was only a matter of time before we saw IDs scannable surreptitiously, and from a distance. Looks like I ought to hurry up and get my passport before the new changes take effect.
And another one I mentioned at InformIT.com:
Not to be outdone, I guess, Amazon has just announced the release of Alexa Web Services. Alexa, as you may or may not know, is a service that crawls the web and collects information such as how popular a site is. (It's also the place to find the Wayback Machine, which shows you what sites looked like, oh, 8 years ago.)
The new service lets you request information about a site such as its popularity, language, file size, incoming and outgoing links, and so on, as well as listing links for a particular category.
Amazon has also announced the release of version 4.0 of their popular Amazon Web Services, now known as E-Commerce Service.
As I commented over at InformIT.com:
Ooooo, I'm excited about this one. Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregator. In other words, you sign up for an account, and then you can "subscribe" to various feeds and see them all in one place, right there on the Bloglines site. Now they've released an API that lets developers pull subscription and item information for building clients and other apps.
Can't wait to play with this one...
Iv'e never quite understood why why were supposed to capitalize "Internet", and wherever possible I've lowercased "web", to the constant chagrin of copyeditors. So I'm thrilled that Wired has annoucned that it will no longer capitalize internet, web, or net. Why?
The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
Here's a cool thing I just discovered. Apparently you can add extensions to Mozilla and Mozilla-based products such as Firefox (my browser of choice) and Thunderbird (my email reader of choice). These extensions are items such as feedreaders and calendars. Haven't poked around yet, but maybe I'll download some themes...
Ever been to a page that says, "We've moved! You'll be redirected in 20 seconds," and then 20 seconds later (or thereabouts) a new page appears without your having clicked anything? Here's how it's done.
At the top of your page, add a "meta" tag. This tag passes information about the page to the browser. for example, if I wanted to redirect you to this blog's home page after 30 seconds, I'd use the tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="30;URL=http://www.nicholaschase.com/blog">
Here's what that does. First it tells the browser to refresh, or reload the page. The content attribute tells it when -- in this case, after 30 seconds -- and where to go when it does. When the browser refreshes, it will go to the specified URL.
You can also use this for simply refreshing a page by adding its own URL. Just make sure you set the delay high enough for the page to be useable!
So Lindows is now Linspire, and if you think you'll have trouble remember the name, check out Come on baby, run Linspire. Hehehe. Love the faces.
Writing a PHP page and need to accept files from a form? Here's the skinny, according to the PHP Manual entry on Handling file uploads:
First, you will of course need the HTML form:
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="_URL_"
method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE"
value="30000" />
Send this file: <input name="userfile" type="file" />
<input type="submit" value="Send File" />
</form>
Then you'll need to save the file in the PHP page:
<?php
// In PHP versions earlier than 4.1.0, $HTTP_POST_FILES
//should be used instead
// of $_FILES.
$uploaddir = '/var/www/uploads/';
$uploadfile = $uploaddir . $_FILES['userfile']['name'];
print "<pre>";
if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['userfile']['tmp_name'],
$uploadfile)) {
print "File is valid, and was successfully uploaded. ";
print "Here's some more debugging info:\n";
print_r($_FILES);
} else {
print "Possible file upload attack! Here's some ";
print "debugging info:\n";
print_r($_FILES);
}
print "</pre>";
?>
Need to get a certain date or time -- other than right now? Here's a hint: don't use java.util.Date. Use java.util.GregorianCalendar instead. For example, if you needed a date object that represented the moment twenty four hours ago:
java.util.GregorianCalendar lastAcceptable =
new java.util.GregorianCalendar();
lastAcceptable.add(java.util.Calendar.HOUR, -24);
You can use any of the constants defined in java.util.Calendar to add or subtract time from a date. Check out the GregorianCalendar API for more information on manipulating and retreiving dates and times.
With the way kids expect everything to be done for them, do we really have the creativity left in this world to take advantage of Decentralization and Commodification? I hope so.
For a while now, I've been thinking about the idea of posting chapters of a book as I write them and inviting comment. I've been particularly thinking about it lately, as I ponder a book that's more ... well ... philosophical than my usual work. (More on that when I've figured out how to express it in words rather than just vague notions and gestures.) Anyway, I must have been thinking too loudly, because today's San Jose Mercury News talks about what happens when authors open texts online for others to edit.
I do think it's going to happen more and more often, as we fully acclimate to "social media".
Now featured on developerWorks: Using the Generic Log Adapter with the Log and Trace Analyzer
The GLA and LTA are Eclipse-based tools that enable logs to be parsed for occurrences of pre-defined events, relate those events to situations, and recommend actions based on information in a knowledge base. This tutorial is of particular interest to developers and administrators of applications with dependencies on multiple servers, such as DB2, Apache, and WebSphere. The key lesson imparted here is how to use the GLA to create your own adapter for custom application logs. Additionally, the tutorial introduces the underlying elements of the log adapter process. These low-level enablers of autonomic computing systems are an important contributor to the creation of more autonomic computing systems. This tutorial takes you through an example of how high-level open standards, such as the Common Base Event description, can be incorporated into development and administration functions at a practical level.
Hi
Just read your article on php and forms. Thanks for putting such a resource on the web. Just one quick question though. I don't want to have a check box initially checked but when I leave it blank it doesn't show up in the results. I am trying to produce a csv so this leaves me with one less coloum.
Is there a way around this
Thanks
David
Hi, David!
The nature of checkboxes is that they only show up if they're selected. You can either use a radio button instead, or you can stay with the checkbox but also include an empty hidden field of the same name. That way there's always a "value" with that name, even if the checkbox doesn't come through. Be careful, though, you'll then have to deal with multiple values for a
single field.
I hope that helps!
---- Nick
It's interesting that we consider an 81% response rate to the top 40 major sites -- such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft.com, and Apple.com -- to be a blackout of major Web sites. I don't know that I'd agree, but how integrated are we that we even notice this kind of thing?
Here's a little tidbit for you: always make sure you know what application you're executing. Three times now, the http://www.metrosphere.com has gone down because the HTTP server hung up. That sounds like a simple problem, except that MetroSphere runs on IBM's WebSphere Portal, so the HTTP server is only a small part of the process. Trouble was, when I restarted the httpd server, it wasn't recognizing the portal application server. Twice, I spent a week in technical support hell, with a severity one problem (production system down). That means I personally have to be on call 24 hours a day until it's resolved.
Twice now, the problem has mysteriously resolved itself after we figured out all the other problems. This time I decided to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and find out what the deal was with the HTTP server before I even touched the application server.
The answer?
Although I was going to the /opt/IBMHTTPServer/bin directory,
httpd
was running a different application than
./httpd
The former was running an HTTP server that is, I think, part of Linux. The latter actually runs the version we need to run.
Let that be a lesson to you. (I know it's a lesson to me!)
Now on developerWorks: Understand the Autonomic Management Engine
"The idea of an autonomic computing system is attractive -- who wouldn't want a system that knows what to look for, and what to do if it finds it? But, building one from scratch is too much of an undertaking for most shops. Fortunately, the Autonomic Management Engine simplifies the process. This tutorial explains how AME works and shows you how to embed it into one of your own applications."
This is actually pretty cool. Well, I think so, anyway. :)
Chemical giant Monsanto has spent years developing "Roundup-Ready Grain" -- specifically canola seeds that aren't killed by herbicide -- and charges farmers $15 an acre roualties to plant it. They also require farmers to buy new seed every year, rather than simply saving seeds from the previous year's crop. But when some of these seeds blew on to Percy Schmeiser's farm in Canada, Monsanto sued Schmeiser over it. The Canada Supreme Court ruled for Monsanto in that they said Schmeiser couldn't use the seeds, but they said that Schmeiser did not have to pay hundreds of dollars in Monsanto's court costs.
Via tima thinking outloud >Tima Out Loud, Six Apart has made some changes to the licenses that were such a controversy. First, they've changed the personal license from 3 authors and 5 blogs to 5 and 5, with the ability to purchase more of each for $9.95 each. Also, a "blog" is defined as a site, as opposed to a subsite, so most of the people who were pissed off that they would now have to pay actually still qualify for the free version.
Ever heard of XUL? It's a new way of building web applications in Mozilla (and the newer versions of Netscape). Kind of like a "super" form, with all kinds of interactivity available. I still haven't had time to fool around with it, despite a brief interlude when it looked like I might have to write a tutorial on it, but check out the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a very cool look at what you can do with it. This link is via Jono Bacon's Mozilla and the potential for interaction, which is itself an interesting read, considering the idea of porting applications such as OpenOffice to XUL.
Cool.
OK, so Six Apart releases Movable Type 3.0. They remove the restriction preventing people from charging money to support it, and they still provide a free version. So what's the complaining about? Apparently people are ticked that the free version only allows 1 author and 3 weblogs. The "Personal" version allows 3 authors and 5 blogs, and costs (right now) $70.
OK, folks, a "personal" blog is, well, YOU. It's not you hosting things for your friends. It's YOU. If you want twenty seven different blogs, then fine, create them as categories and do different templates. If you want to use the free version to enable your friends to host their blogs on your server, fine, just install multiple copies of the free version. Its not that big of a deal. These people have put a lot of work into their product, they deserve compensation.
Get over it.
XInclude, designed to make it easier to include part of one XMl document into another, has been a neglected specification for a long time. Now Bob DuCharme gives a good example of how it can be useful with Transclude with XInclude (and XPointer!). It still doesn't address the security issues, but OK, there you are.
If you're reading this blog from top to bottom, by now you've discovered that I'm doing a little bookmark housekeeping, saving some of my bookmarks for posterity (and future reference). Of course, from my perspective, this is the first of them, so I'll apologize in advance for me and in retrospect to you for all of them. :)
I'm one of those people who doesn't believe in memorizing anything that can be looked up. It's much more important to know that something can be done than how it's done. You can always look up the latter. One thing I am always having to look up is how to open a popup window from the browser, and Accessible Pop-up Links from A List Apart is a great tutorial. A word of warning, though: the defaults string needs to be all one line for IE.
I've been thrilled with Movable Type, and I love the fact that people can add their own plug-ins. Now I've found Developing Movable Type Plug-ins, which looks like a pretty decent tutorial. One of these days I'll have time to try it out.
Now in the XML Reference Guide over at : DOM and PHP
PHP has support for XML built in, but as far as production code, it's limited to SAX. You can install the DomDocument module, but you do, of course, have to have access to the actual server in order to use it. Fortunately, for those of you who, like me, use an external web server and don't have that kind of control, there's a simple way to get Document Object Model functionality. ...
This must be my week for being featured! Domino applications and the Portal API was featured in this week's IBM Portal News:
Lotus Domino is great for storing all sorts of information in one place, and WebSphere Portal is great for gathering information from all sorts of places. But how do you get the two of them together? One option is to directly incorporate your Domino data into your portal application using the WebSphere Portal API. This tutorial details the process for reading from, and writing to, a Domino database from within a portlet.
I've been hearing a lot about A9 lately, but at first glance it doesn't look like anything special. Just another search engine that uses Google's database. Or is it? Not so, according to A9: The Future of Information Access?
I've been publishing for IBM for a couple of years now, so I don't even blink when they feature an article of mine, but this
is really cool. Last summer, I took a trip to Austin Texas to sit in on a session of IBM engineers talking about their brand new Autonomic Computing initiative. I came home and proposed about 15 articles and tutorials and such. Or was it 25? I can't remember now. It's been such a long road to get here -- I didn't write all of the pieces, but I've been involved in most of them in one way or another -- but it's still cool to see my "vision" out there for people to see.
Now the featured story on developerWorks: A quick tour of autonomic computing
Autonomic computing architecture is a range of software technologies that enable you to build an information infrastructure that can, to lesser and greater degrees, manage itself, saving countless hours (and dollars) in human management. And all this without giving up control of the system. This tutorial explains the concepts behind autonomic computing and looks at the tools at your disposal for making it happen -- today.
Now on InformIT in the XML Reference Guide: Java in XSLT: Extension Functions
Using XSLT to transform XML into another form has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is flexibility. When you want to change the output, you don't have to go back to the code, you simply have to change the XSLT style sheet. But it's easy to mistake this simplicity for shallowness. XSLT can enable you to do much more than simply reformatting text.
Rogers Cadenhead points out that the free download of Laurence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity includes a standard copyright term, rather than the Founder's Copyright of 14 years, with an option to renew for 14 more.
Thing is, he also released it under a license, which enables other people to use it -- which is the point of his fight against insanely long copyright terms.
I do agree with Rogers, though; would have been nice if the book reverted to Public Domain sometime in our lifetimes.
Sarah is always bugging me to come up with an idea for "the next big thing." (I've got a pretty good track record of figuring out what the next trend is, but I never have the time or the funds to capitalize on it...) Anyway, Bill Gates gets to do the one thing I'd love to do: Think Weeks. He goes off and doesn't answer any emails or phone calls or anything, and just researches and makes comments. Eweek has an article on What Bill Gates Is Thinking that's interesting...
One day I'll get around to doing some kind of case mod, but until then I'll have to make do with Tech Tatts, tattoos for your gear.
Apparently Jason DeFillippo decided to see what it would take to code a shortlink services. This is a service, such as TinyURL that enables you to enter a long URL, then gives you back a short one you can pass around. The server forwards requests to the real URL, and you don't have to email those hideous multi-line URLS. Trouble was, spammers started using Jason's service, so he had to take it offline. The good news is that he's made it available for download so anybody can make their own. Hm.
I'm always on the lookout for content, and apparently I don't have to work nearly as hard as I do. (If you read this blog, you know that I'm unsuccessful carving out time for content more often than not.) Now I've found Freesticky: An index of free web site content, free content providers and self publishing resources. Of course, tonight I'm hot on the trail of some items for the InformIT XML Reference Guide, so I'll have to let you know how it goes.
One of these days I'll get around to putting a TV tuner card in my computer, but there's a little voice inside my head that points out that if I do that I might as well have the monitor planted in my brain, because I'll never be away from the computer. Still, it's interesting that you can pretty easily (and inexpensively) Watch TV on your Linux computer. Apparently you don't even need a powerful machine. In this case the example is an old 133MHz Pentium.
John wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
> I wonder if you could answer a problem I am having
> processing an XML file with a Java application. The
> XML file is ejb-jar.xml. There is a line referencing a
> DTD e.g.
> Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0//EN"
> "http://java.sun.com/dtd/ejb-jar_2_1.dtd">.
> However, when my internet connection or java.sun.com
> is down, I am unable to retrieve the dtd and thus get
> a FileNotFoundException. I have tried saving the dtd
> in the java classpath with no success. The error
> occurs when I call: builder.parse(new
> File("ejb-jar.xml"));
>
> Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
> thanks.../john
Hi, John!
The trouble is that the parser is trying to retrieve the file
from http://java.sun.com/dtd/ejb-jar_2_1.dtd. You can solve
this problem by saving a local copy to the same directory as
the XML file and changing the DOCTYPE declaration to read
"-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0//EN"
"ejb-jar_2_1.dtd">
I hope that helps!
---- Nick
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: DOM and Perl
Perl was originally designed as a lnaguage for sorting through text, so it's not surprising that it is a good fit for XML. In fact, there are multiple ways to handle XML using Perl, so in this section we're going to look at manipulating DOM "objects" using the Perl XML::DOM module, available on CPAN. ...
Lately I've been giving serious thought to releasing a free eBook version of XML Primer Plus, so this paper by Cory Doctorow on the true nature of eBooks caught my attention.
Plus, he's released the paper under a Creative Commons license, so in the interest of making his words even more immortal, I'm going to reproduce it right here.
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor BooksPaper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
February 12, 2004
San Diego, CA
Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
--
Forematter:
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along
with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't
be released alongside of this file. However, you will find,
interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where
new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets].This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative
Commons public domain dedication:> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)
>
> The person or persons who have associated their work with this
> document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright
> in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the
> public domain.
>
> Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at
> large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors.
> Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of
> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights
> under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work.
> Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights
> includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit
> or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
>
> Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the
> Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used,
> modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any
> purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including
> by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.--
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions
I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a
short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
think it's true.No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
them with you:1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
promote the dead-tree editions.2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
build concordances of characters, places and events.3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the
book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
text.4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better
deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on
the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science
fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science
fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved
are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint*
and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're
*rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf
writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of
us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of
earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would
play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive
for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire
for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the
corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search
engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.
They can be googled.Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best
way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the
best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with
us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a
bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was
recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":[QUOTED TEXT]
> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever
> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't
> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's
> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan
> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed
me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good
name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that
damning passage:[PULL-QUOTE]
> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first
> pageYou see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL
PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of
paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his
novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is
"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer
out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have
it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read
the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the
ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is."
And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to
give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell
your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to
the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
but check this out:[Nietzsche quote]
> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
of Morals," published in *1887.*Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly
funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry
Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire
forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert
Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately
20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way
or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in
soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of
the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention
to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.7. We need *all* the ebooks. [We need *all* the ebooks] The vast
majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no
one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written
work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of
human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with
just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to
complete that collection with different texts that are as
distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look
like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music,
or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking
closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present
at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really
granular observation, there are as many differences in our
"shared" experience as there are similarities.More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference
between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of
books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can
hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by
analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
buy.There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
sales are healthy.We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
*countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
computers are damned good at counting things!). This is
important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of
copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a
difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise
numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a
book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the
run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the
occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books
printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never
exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations,
chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and
that's why.And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen.
Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some
copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
hardest and most important task any writer faces.#
I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers
are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
to lay out both categories of ideas.This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time,
there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these
books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous
book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve"
the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any
book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think
that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet.
I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over
ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper
circles. Writers were joining the discussion on
alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of
retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up
their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My
editor, a blogger, hacker and
guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick
Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup,
saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks
> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and
> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's
> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the
> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally
> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make
> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it
> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that
> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to
> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's
> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18
years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me
to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
rest of the world.Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
every day.This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
[GRAPHIC]These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)* You can't take your ebook into the tub
* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted
grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that
certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their
grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me
email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to
show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her
Florida retirement condo)?The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It
seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper
books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a
little about what the book has gone through in years gone by.
This is interesting because the history of the book is the
history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and,
ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American
Revolution.Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed
on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them
were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool
cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the
books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly
non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey
incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin
Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He
printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and
distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God
all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
printing press:[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the
illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the
typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could
bring to bear when writing out the word of God* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case
for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority
of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed
impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no
incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew
that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
for centuries.In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
raised above with equal certainty.What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
that Luther Bibles kicked ass:[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
without having to subject themselves to the authority and
approval of the Church* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
explained what God really meant* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a
monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the
Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a
success.By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious
little to do with the reasons to love paper books.[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a
midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand
by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have
social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get
to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can
pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single
factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a
friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to
sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume
in a series!* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac
evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a
truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are
bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe
it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But
the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told
the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing
"a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing]
the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,
because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster
captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was
because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available
for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all
the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had
been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile
when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but
they share the trait of making the difference between a
compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio
programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the
majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic
text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on
a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text
for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig.
In other words, most people who download the book do so for the
predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample
a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the
book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text
experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing
out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather
than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the
notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the
wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a
cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that
cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do --
is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the
Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at
little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the
ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and
sending it around.Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly
over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever
(theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice,
copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse
cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney
swings a very big stick on the Hill).This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers
that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from
getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much
true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their
publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that
strong copyright protects you from your *readers*.* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously.
You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers.
Calling them crooks is bad for business.* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in
the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and
hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know.
This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into
signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides
and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary
agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books
they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long
to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement,
especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of
$150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their
representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the
ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information
before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.
This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong
side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse:
publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them
from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to
prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in
the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts
because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a
work carries such a terrible price.* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of
certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire
long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of
science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still
known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual
descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if
their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might
just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the
public domain.This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a
thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes,
too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup:
a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease
with which it can reproduced.(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business
about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than
the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the
Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio
had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent*
control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform
to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could
build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them
performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a
monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change,
Napster is peanuts)Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded
off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by
bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as
expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as
did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in
comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a
copy of her own.Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still
hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at
Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of
musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.
The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on
the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing
press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type
migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items
that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that
*need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on
creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most
enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's
a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a
photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery
and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
creators with their audiences.For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real
property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current
copyright only considers the last generation of tech.So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the
end of the world? *Duh*. If the Catholic church can survive the
printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent
of bookwarez.#
Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or
extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra
to thank you for your patience.About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most
restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my
readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was
cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it
felt like I was taking a plunge.Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text
of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN
READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my
blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can
make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction
(God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK
HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it,
with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to
rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking
mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially.The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what
happens when I get in up to my knees.The text with the new license will be online before the end of
the day. Check craphound.com/down for details.Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a
Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain
dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see
fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is
through.#
EOF
That's the end of this talk, for now. Thank you all for your kind
attention. I hope that you'll keep on the lookout for more
detailed topology of the shape of ebooks and help me spot them
here in plain sight.
Cory DoctorowMidflight over Texas
February 4, 2004
Robert Cringely was right on 12 of his 15 predictions for 2003, and now offers his predictions for 2004.
Now updated on developerWorks: Integrating applications with Web services using WebSphere Studio V5.1.1: "This tutorial looks at making your application Web-services ready using WebSphere Studio's tools to wrap an existing application as a Web service, announce it using a UDDI directory, and to discover and use Web services within your applications. It also looks at how to deploy your application to a WebSphere Application Server."
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: .NET and XMLReader
In the world of XML, it's natural to think of XML in terms of two contexts: DOM and SAX. DOM is flexible, in that it provides the ability to navigate around the document tree and make changes, but SAX is fast, in that it doesn't load the entire document into memory, looking instead at just a single node at a time in a forward-only, read-only manner. ...
Just posted at InformIT:
Microsoft has announced that it would hold off on the "minor changes" it would need to make to Internet Explorer in order to comply with the adverse ruling it received in the the Eolas case.
This case is the definition of ambivalence for me.
Sigh.
Well, Opportunity has landed on the opposite side of Mars from Spirit, and (for the moment, at least) appears to be in excellent health. It has landed in a small impact crater which will give it the opportunity to study different layers of the Martian soil without doing much digging, but is shallow enough so it can ultimately drive out and head for a larger crater nearby.
Let's see how long this one lasts.
Microsoft has admitted that "perhaps it had taken its trademark rights 'a little too seriously'" when it sued 17 year old Mike Rowe over his domain name, MikeRoweSoft.com. This week the case was settled, with Microsoft agreeing to trade Rowe the domain for "a free Microsoft Xbox video-game console and a free trip to the company's Redmond campus for the Microsoft Research Tech Fest" as well as Microsoft paying for him to pursue Microsoft certification and any costs involved in moving his web design business to a new domain. Microsoft will also direct mikerowesoft.com's traffic to the new domain.
Well, I've finally gotten around to writing about .NET, with a section on DOM and .NET at the InformIT XML Reference Guide. It explains how to create an application in .NET that traverses the Document Object Model of an XML Document object. It uses Visual Basic .NET, but the concepts are the same for C#.
I covet TiVo. I will one day own a TiVo. Or rather, a PVR or some sort. I know it's possible to build your own, but as Matt Reider discovered,
it's tougher than it seems.
Well, I've finally taken the gloves off and posted a snarky posting to InformIT, What? You mean you can read an XML file from another application?
The scoop? Microsoft is now trying to patent methods for reading an XML file produced by another application as a way to keep companies from building competing products that read a Word file.
But I've dropped my usual objective demeanor on this one. Let's see if anybody notices or -- gasp -- comments on the InformIT blog. I hope so.
I've just deleted exactly 314 comment spams sent to this blog. Fortunately, I am conversant enough to simply wipe them out with a single SQL statement to the database rather than doing it individually, so the most annoying part was simply waiting for the scumbag to finish so I didn't have to rebuild the site more than once.
But I'm truly, deeply, annoyed now. It's one thing to send one or two comments, but this moron sent a comment to literally every single post on the site. That, as the Irish say, is going beyond the beyond. So, since I have the IP address the comments were posted from, I have sent the following email to FAST.NET, the spammers connection ISP:
--------
Ladies and/or gentlemen --
I have just deleted some 300 identical comment spams to my website. I
am including a sample below. These were likely done with a script, as
they arrived 2-3 per minute. I don't know (or care) whether you host
any of the domains this person is trying to advertise, but the actual
spams originated on your network. They were sent between 3:27pm and
5:12pm EST today.
Please let me know what action you will be taking.
Thank you,
Nicholas Chase
--------------------- MESSAGE INCLUDED BELOW ---------------------
IP Address: 207.29.194.4
Name: propecia
Email Address: puner_vol@freemail.com
URL: (snipped)
(rest of the message snipped for obvious reasons)
------------
I'll keep you posted on what Fast.net actually does.
I've been meaning to create a favicon for this site for a while, and now that I've found Chami.com's FavIcon from Pics, I can do that. Now I just have to find that organ grinder and get permission to use the picture of her monkey.
I have some pretty significant carpal tunnel problems. Before I got a split keyboard, I looked like I had a half a golf ball under my skin. Six months later, it looks like half a grape, but I'm still in some pretty significant pain most days. So I'm intrigued by the NoHands Mouse. It's a pair of foot pedals, with one used to move the mouse, and the other for clicking. At about $300 bucks, though, it's going to have to wait for a while.
I'd be interested if anybody's used, it, or anything like it, though.
Apparently scientists have lost contact with Spirit, the Mars rover. it's been over 24 hours since they were able to talk to it.
Theories abound:
"There is no one single fault that explains all the observables," Theisinger said. Among the possibilities could be a software glitch that caused the rover to reset itself, or a power surge, or a temperature-related hardware failure, or perhaps even a cosmic-ray hit, he said.
And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has come up. During the Mars Pathfinder mission, engineers had to reset the rover's software serveral times.
So here's what I don't understand: shouldn't the first order of business be to figure out why we keep losing these things? I mean, I would assume that an $820 million project includes some pretty extensive software testing. (But then, I would have assumed the all the teams working on such a project would have been using the same units of measurement, which I guess hasn't been a safe assumption on past projects.)
Not that I necessarily agree with my friend Eric's notion that there's something up there that doesn't want us poking around -- though I can never tell when he's joking -- but it seems to me that getting this kind of information would be a project worth doing.
OK, the first posting from the list is up. News from the world of DSDL incorporates items number 2, 3, 4 and 5 and talks about Document Schema Definition Languages, which aims to make it easier to validate documents that have data from more than one namespace, such as a SOAP envelope or an XHTML document with SVG embedded within it.
If you ask me, they should have quit while they were behind. When a Canadian teenager, Mike Rowe, registered MikeRoweSoft.com for his web design company, they offered him a paltry $10 (Canadian!) to give up the name. He told them he wanted $1000, so now they're suing. Come on, Bill, you light your cigars with bills bigger than that.
(UPDATE: Another story in The Register says that he asked for not $1000, but $10,000. Which is a different animal, unfortunately.)
I understand that there are people who read all of the blogs on their blogroll every day, or at least, every few days. And they even find time to comment on them. I want to know who these people are and how they manage to make a living.
I have, in essence, three blogs that I am supposed to be updating on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do at least three blogs a week for the XML Reference Guide, I've got this one, and I've got The Vanguard Science Fiction Report, which has been fallow so long I'm embarrassed to admit that it's mine. So today, now that the weeks of emergency room visits and surgeries in the family have settled down into the normal level of chaos, I sat down and went through my blogroll for potential posting material.
I thought it might be a little educational to document the "flow" of my surfing, and how it eventually gets turned into actual postings, so here is the list of the "first cut". These are postings that may eventually wind up on one of my three blogs:
And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:
Even I can't believe how long the list is.
As you can see, it's a rather eclectic group, but it also shows the pattern of how I surf. (Note that I didn't even touch Op-Ed News today, because I know I have enough material for this blog, which is the only place it belongs, or the W3C because I've adopted a "monthly" schedule for them on InformIT.)
Over the next week or so, you can see what makes the cut and what doesn't, and what leads to other things.
So I posted over at InformIT about How to survive the changes to IE.
So what are the actual changes? Well, it turns out to not be as bad as originally thought. The patent covers the automatic loading of an application that resides on a remote server, so a page either needs to avoid automatically loading the application or loading it from a remote server. For the former, IE will pop up a window asking the user to click a button to load the Active X control. For the latter, Microsoft has guidance on embedding the data directly into the page so that it doesn't actually have to be loaded remotely. They also provide a look at using JavaScript to create the object tag in such a way that the patent isn't violated, but you don't have to jump through a hundred hoops to keep the dialogue box from coming up.
What I want to know is: how does this embedding affect security? Is it possible that slimebags are currently embedding the code in the page to avoid warnings about downloading controls?
More fodder for discusson on InformIT: Technology, social norms, and why it matters
Does technology shape us, or do we shape technology? Or is it a little bit of both? I think there's an inexorable cycle, in which we find ourselves rocked by a new paradigm, then adjust to it as though we'd never lived without it, and then start all over again. For example, take just the last century or so. We started out terrified of electricity "leaking" out of wall sockets. Then, of course, we couldn't get along without it. Then came radio, and television. Once we were good and settled in there, we got computers. Then the Internet. Then the World Wide Web. (No, those last two are not the same.)
At the end of December, I wrote about The evils of escaped markup as seen by Normal Walsh. It was a well-though-out piece about why he doesn't like that people are using CDATA sections to escape potentially non-well-formed content, particularly in data feeds.
But the interesting thing to me is that I'd actually already written about this particular topic -- and in fact, this particular piece of Norman's -- last summer.
So far, nobody has noticed. Or if they have, they haven't commented.
I'm considering thinking of something completely ridiculous and controversial to say just to see if anybody notices. Suggestions welcome.
I just commented over at InformIT about the changes to IT. Now that I see what they actually are, I can see that it's frankly not that big a deal. Or is it? The idea is that the patent covers the launching of a remote application, so instead, the plan is to get people to either create a script that creates the object tag or to embed the ActiveX control into the page as Base64.
So now I'm thinking: what kind of security concerns are engendered by the fact that the code is embedded on the page? Because they're not being downloaded, hwo will the user be able to filter out what they want to enable to run and what they don't?
In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: DOM and .NET
With XML so fundamental in Microsoft's .NET framework, it should come as no surprise that the ability to manipulate an XML document is built right into the system. In fact, although DOM Level 2.0 doesn't include a standard way to create or save a document, .NET makes it easy. In this section, we'll get a feel for how these manipulations work by using Visual Basic .NET to load a simple document, make some changes to it, and then save it back out to a file. (We'll be running directly from the command line, so if you're not familiar with GUI programming, don't worry.) ...
Apparently someone has figured out how to make WIFI antennas from paper clips. I don't see why not, of course. I must be spending too much time studying for my Amateur Radio Extra Class license, though, because when I saw this one (and, to a lesser extent, this one) my first thought was "Now there's the driven element, and that's the reflector, and .."
I just wish they weren't both in French.
Apparently the script used for MT's "Mail this entry" function is vulnerable to spammers. To solve the problem quickly, rename mt-send-entry.cgi. New versions of MT 2.64 have the fix incorporated.
(For some reason this posting draws a high number of comment spams, so I've turned off commenting for it. Sorry!)
I really don't pay much attention to search engine rankings, to be honest. I just try to product good content and leave it at that. But some people do seem to be ... well, fixated's probably the wrong word, but concerned. So as surprised as I was to see a referrer log entry for a Google search for "engineering strapless evening gown", I was even more surprised to find out that if you run that search, my posting about the IgNobel Prize actually comes up in the very top spot.
I give up trying to figure that one out.
(Update: And apparently, I'm number 3 for "blog 'federal reserve'" and number 5 (on Google) and 4 (on Yahoo) for "federal reserve conspiracy theories". Oh, and number 6 for "stop alien abductions". Well, nobody can say I'm not well rounded.)
Periodically I need to send or receive an email that's just too big for most people's mailboxes. Now the dropload service takes care of that problem. You upload the file and provide the email address, and the system sends the recipient instructions on how to pick it up. Files can be up to 50 megs (deleted after 48 hours, picked up or not), and the service is free. Cool.
Clay Shirky's new column is up: Shirky: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed
His point this time? That encryption didn't catch on because it was, presumably, only needed by people with something to hide, such as criminals. But the RIAA's suits against filesharers have, essentially, turned us all into felons, so now it's catching on, and like organized crime and Prohibition, it's likely to stay long after its cause disappears.
This one's been sitting in my inbox for a while: IBM, JBoss eye new Java plan
Apparently, in a bid to head off Microsoft's C#, IBM and JBoss are diving into Aspect Oriented Programming in a big way. It will be an extension to Java.
So I was thinking over at InformIT about standards bodies and their relevance, but my really big question is this: what would happen if we all decided NOT to use an accepted standard, and used something else instead?
I mean, seriously. What if a group of scientists decided not to use the "accepted" names for the elements, or renamed the planets or something? I mean, there's no law about it, right?
Here's a handy little do-dad. When it comes to making colors, I can do the whole red-and-blue-makes-purple thing, but how do you make orange out of red, green, and blue? The 216 Color Color-Safe Palette page shows the colors that you can safely use on a web page for both PC and Mac -- and their hex values.
One day I want to have the time to take on a project like Hacking Billy Mouth Bass in Linux. You remember, Big Mouth Billy Bass, don't you? He's the mounted fish that flops around while singing "Take me to the River." Well, here we have a proposal to turn Billy into a full-blown video conferencing station. Right now he's just at the point of user-definable audio clips (and pseudo- lip-synching), but it's pretty funny. Look for Billy quoting "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky..."
Imagine you walk past a scanner and it registers unqiue ids for each item of clothing you're wearing and for each dollar bill in your pocket. Oh, and your driver's license, which also identifies you with all the items it's recorded. It could happen, as privacy concerns mount over retail use of RFID technology.
So here I was thinking about how unusual it was that FCC chairman Michael Powell Opposes Internet Phone Regulation. After all, this is the same agency that thinks it's just fine for media conglomerates to own even more of the nation's collective mind than they already do, so why should he protect small Internet phone companies over the likes of AT&T and Comcast? Simple. He doesn't. Turns out the majors have finally figured out that they can escape all the taxes they pay on their regular networks by running their calls over the Internet instead.
Ned Batchelder points out an article on cargo cult engineering. As Richard Feynman described them cargo cults are "a cargo cult of people [in the South Seas]. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."
Feynman talks about how this relates to scientific research, in which researchers fail to understand the causes of their results, but in the case of cargo cult engineering, companies mistake a symptom of successful projects (long hours) with the cause (personal commitment of the engineers). Interesting reading.
In my research about cargo cults (more in a few minutes) I came across an interesting navigational element on the Apologetics Index. The menu stays as a tab on the left and travels when you scroll (though it's a tad distracting to start with) and pops out when you roll over it. My first thought is that it would be an accessibility nightmare, but now I'm thinking that if you did it right, you could make it work for those both with and without scripting support -- if the script doesn't work, the navigation simply appears -- and for those with traditional and non-traditional browsers.
Hm.
It's nice to know that not everybody takes the industry so seriously. Check out James Turner's Comdex rundown.
I got a good chuckle this morning from The Bug Count Also Rises, the Imitation Hemingway Contest Winner.
I'm in need of somebody who knows both Domino and Java for a writing project with quick turnaround. If you're that person, please email me.
Unfortunately, I still don't have the time to devote to it that I'd like, but all this talk about Chatbots has gotten me thinking about Natural Language Processing. fieldmethods.net is an NLP-oriented portal that seems to have interesting information.
My first "real" programming job was building kiosks using Macromedia Director. It was also my first experience with having more than one monitor. It spoiled me forever. Now Darrell Norton has some metrics on multiple monitors and productivity. He made sure that all developers on a large project had multiple monitors and found that:
"After multiple monitors were introduced:
* Productivity in lines of code per day increased 10%.
* Defect levels decreased by 26%."
Now where did I stash that extra monitor ...?
I commented more extensively on Clay Shirky's The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview over on InformIT, but I have one more point to question.
Clay's talking about syllogisms, and uses this one as an example of why thy don't work:
"Consider the following assertions:
- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real
You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real."
Excuse me? I think the main problem is that he's mis-understanding the difference between
A are B
and
All A are B
I commented more over at InformIT.
Over on my InformIT XML blog, I've noted that XML 1.1 is almost here, and not everybody is happy about it. Elliotte Rusty Harold specifically says "Don't use it."
Also, on a more lighthearted note, I've also noted over at the Vanguard Science Fiction Report that:
Now on developerWorks: DOM NodeFilters and XML data binding: Using a DOM NodeFilter lets you control the contents of a set of XML data without touching the base application, but the NodeFilter itself is still a class, and needs to be recompiled in order to make any non-trivial changes. This tutorial explains how to build a system that enables a user to control both the criteria for a report and the structure of that criteria simply by providing XML input, either through a file or through a web service, using XML Data Binding.
Apparently the Batik SVG package from Apache has a built-in rasterizer to convert SVG images to JPGs, so you don't have to rely on the user having an SVG viewer installed. Cool! Benoit Marchal explains how it works.
Now on developerWorks: Grab headlines from a remote RSS file: This article shows you how to retrieve syndicated content and convert it into headlines for your site. Since no official format for such feeds exists, aggregators are often faced with the difficulty of supporting multiple formats, so Nick also explains how to use XSL transformations to more easily deal with multiple syndication file formats. (This was actually published in September.)
I've been meaning to start dabbling in artificial intelligence for a long time, an as-yet-still-covered-by-NDA project notwithstanding. The Mind Files makes me want to dive into the world of chatbots. Very cool, and according to the background, it's accessible to just about anybody. Maybe I will add an AI bot of my own to this site...
Jitte's also got a new blog going, where he was nice enough to mention Chaos Magnet. Thanks!
I am pretty darn proud of XML Primer Plus. I knew the subject well, and I worked hard on it. I also feel good about the fact that it covers not only Java, but also C++, VB.NET, Perl, and PHP, thanks to the help of some additional writers. The reviews have all been good, and even the four star review on Amazon says that the only reason he didn't give me five stars is because he feels that that levels should be reserved for "recognized experts in the field," which I clearly am not.
But sales have been, frankly, disappointing. I was feeling really bad about it -- until I found out that The XML Book Business is in the toilet. With very few exceptions (and frankly I can't think of any), nobody's XML books are selling.
So tell me, are you buying XML books? Why or why not?
When I was designing this site, I used CSS to create a layout that was both aesthetically pleasing -- OK, I'll settle for not hideously ugly -- but still accessible to those with text-based browsers. For a long time when I mentioned text-based browsers, people laughed at me, but many of the accessibility software, such as screen readers for the blind, use this method. But still, I wondered what the site would actually "look" like. Now, thanks to this link from Redemption, I've found that you can view your site in Lynx without having to actually install it. (You can, believe it or not, still get Lynx, even for Windows!) And actually, this site doesn't look half bad. A few tweaks and I may add the "Lynx Inspected" icon.
I actually have a degree in physics, but of course I haven't used it in years. Lately, though, I've been thinking of catching up on a little Quantum Electrodynamics. I did read through QED, which I remembered using in my class in college, but when I started looking into textbooks, I discovered that they're unimaginably expensive. One of them was over a hundred bucks! Now I'm really interested, with quantum computing starting to make news. For example: Japanese boffins advance quantum computing, Boffins unveil world's most powerful quantum computer and IBM demos quantum computing.
Maybe it's more worth studying than I thought...
Now on developerWorks: Making of MetroSphere, Part 24: Giving the user control - the ultimate portal theme: The heart of the MetroSphere site is the community weblog, but we also want to give users the ability to create pages that reflect their own personalities. Portal enables an administrator to add a new theme to the site, but because allowing users to add a new theme involves unacceptable security risks, built-in capabilities limit user control to selecting from available themes. This tutorial explains how to give users much of the same power they would have by creating a new theme without actually creating one.
Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphere, Part 23: Send messages between portlets: Sometimes, in the development of a portal, you need two portlets to talk to each other. For example, on MetroSphere, when the user clicks a topic in the Topic List portlet, the team needs the information to be sent not only to the Topic List portlet, but also to the Show Blog portlet. This portlet describes the process for sending messages between portlets and recording the information in the PortletSession object.
Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphere, Part 22: Set topics -- custom attributes and user sessions: In Part 21 of this series, Nick showed you how to add a custom attribute to users' information that represented their preferred topics. In this article, he shows you how to use that custom attribute as well as session information to enable users to choose between showing all topics and showing only their preferred topics.
Clay Shirky's latest, Shirky: File-sharing Goes Social is an interesting look at the RIAA's strategy of going after big file sharers and the evolution of file sharing networks into more private spaces. Interesting as always.
Eolas is trying to enjoin Microsoft to stop distributing Internet Explorer. Yeah, right. On the other hand, wouldn't that be a boost for Mozilla.
When the RSS controversy first surfaced, I couldn't understand why so many people were so gung-ho to jettison RSS. I still don't. Yes, it's good to have a standard. But come on, people, it shouldn't be that big a deal to adapt to new formats. The very first tip I wrote for IBM's developerworks was about reading RSS files (which I mistakenly called RDF files, which is only partially correct) but now that I've been around for a while, I've updated it. The new version, Grab headlines from a remote RSS file shows how to not only grab a file, but also to create a system that converts various versions to a single common format that can then be massaged into the final output. This way, a single XSLT style sheet from, say, Atom to RSS 2.0 could work for everyone, so there was no need to switch, wholesale, to something new and scrap RSS.
One exciting thing is that I wrote to Adam Curry and got his permission to use his blog as an example, and he asked me to let him know when it was published. I don't know whether my not is stuck in his spam filters somewhere or he's just been too swamped to respond -- that's one busy guy! -- but it's still exciting for this MTV-generation boy.
Microsoft has released information on what it's doing to Internet Explorer to comply with the half billion dollar lawsuit they just lost. I've commented over at the InformIT XML Reference Guide.
Phase 2 of the MetroSphere project will center on creating workspaces, but I was wondering exactly how we were going to use them. Ray Ozzie has the answer.
I had no idea how many technical terms I didn't actually know about until I read the Information Security Glossary.
Daniel Drezner's posting got me really thinking about what it is that bothers me about this whole overseas outsourcing thing.
Let me make something clear.
I'm not opposed to spreading the wealth, so-to-speak, by providing jobs overseas, necessarily. What bothers me is the dishonesty about it. OK, you're doing it to boost the bottom line. Fine. Just don't try and tell us that it's to boost sales (ie, Boeing) or that we're going to like it, really.
Jon, who has "worked in and through the waves of global outsourcing first in the Engineering and Construction industry and most recently in the IT industry" probably put it best in his comment on Drezner's original post: "I do agree that the gains from this trend will benefit American corporations. However the benefit will not extend to the consumer and most certainly not to those displaced US employees suddenly finding a barren market for their career skills and expertise within the US.
Corporations will get the profit of the less costly operating and production costs found off-shore, which wealth will be re-distributed in executive incentive and bonus packages, certainly in no way returned to those US employees no longer employed. And the Administration’s support for reduced corporate taxation further lessen the degree to which the fruits of this labor will be reintegrated in a manner beneficial to the populace at large. The fantasy that US corporations will adopt as SOP and offer released workers “ex-employment” insurance is exactly that – a fantasy."
Daniel Drezner suggests that I don't understand that in some cases one person can be made better off without someone else being made worse off. Of course I understand that. I just don't think that moving high-paying tech jobs overseas is one of those situations. And looking at the first few comments on his posting, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks the likelihood of companies buying "targeted insurance products" to cushion the effects to workers displaced is, to say the least, unlikely.
Drezner quotes the report's suggestion that "at least theoretically, displaced U.S. workers will find new jobs in more dynamic industries." Why do I suspect that's double-speak for "lower paying jobs somewhere else"? Sure, a coder can get a job flipping burgers, but is that really an improvement for anybody but corporate shareholders?
So no, I don't understand how this is good for American workers. I'll tell you what else I don't understand. I don't understand how you can tell me that effectively eliminating overtime will create more jobs, when it's now cheaper to have fewer workers and make them work longer hours. I don't understand how a member of Congress can say that poor working families don't deserve a tax credit because they pay no taxes, when a much larger portion of their income goes to gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and other taxes that don't scale based on economic class.
I don't understand why we as Americans, we have allowed ourselves to become so complacent to what is clearly unfair.
Maybe it's just that John Dickinson was right, as quoted in 1776: "A poor man will fight to the death to protect the possibility of becoming rich, rather than face the reality of being poor."
I hope not.
(Additional note: Daniel Drezner actually has an impressive CV. I'll definitely be checking out some of his other writing.)
I've never read a Clay Shirky essay that wasn't interesting. This one, Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, talks about why micropayments for content will likely continue to fail, and why that's not necessarily a Bad Thing.
The RIAA is preparing for an even more massive onslaught of lawsuits against individual file sharers. One so-called "pirate" is challenging the subpoena of her records, but probably won't get far. The Electronic Frontier Foundation will let you search to see if you're being subpoenaed. The database has 1145 subpoenas at the time of this writing. The effect? According to this SFGate article, "an independent digital media industry analyst, said the 'fear factor' caused usage of file-sharing programs to drop about 22 percent in the seven weeks after the RIAA announced its plans to sue individuals." So that's a victory for the RIAA, right?
Well, not exactly. "Yet Leigh noted industry sales reports show the drop in CD sales accelerated during the same period." In other words, they've pissed off their customers. Basically, people are saying, "I'm not going to buy your product anyway."
It's sad, really. I used to think file sharing was great, because I'm one of those people who would actually listen to the music and then buy it. But I've seen my son's generation adopt an "everything's free" mind-set, which is wrong too.
Years ago, I was part of Mojo Nation, a network that provided a decentralized system of file storage. The idea was interesting, with users getting "tokens" for providing either bandwidth or storage, or whatever. The interesting part was that there was no way to tell what information was being stored on your system. Each document was broken up into pieces, and multiple copies of each piece were distributed over multiple machines. Kind of like an anti-censorship version of the internet, where any one node could be taken down and not effect the integrity of the available data. Overall, I liked the concept, though I was uncomfortable with the idea that I might be inadvertantly providing access to child pornography. Eventually the network collapsed -- or at least I think it did -- and I stopped thinking about it.
But freedom's on my mind a lot lately. I'd never looked into it, but apparently FreeNet is a lot like it, as a distributed system that stymies censorship. But now its founder, Ian Clarke is leaving the USA. Why?
Several reasons really. Firstly, because the work I am doing now doesn't really require me to be in any particular location, I could probably work from the North Pole if I had a fast Internet connection. Secondly, because I don't like living in a country where, as a non-citizen, I am considered less deserving of justice than American citizens. Thirdly, because I feel that the direction intellectual property is being taken in this country, such as with the DMCA and software patents, make innovation much more difficult and risky here, particularly in the P2P space. There are many things I like about the US, but it just doesn't make sense to be here any more.
Thing is, freedom is an elusive thing. Let's go back to my original problem with Mojo Nation for a moment. What about the idea that criminal activities can take place on such a system, or even child pornography? Clarke:
Free speech doesn't exist if people are only free to say what you consider to be decent or true. Few would tolerate the mandatory installation of police cameras in private homes, even though it could prevent all forms of child abuse, and domestic violence. Are those that might oppose such a scheme to be considered advocates of child abuse? The rationale behind Freenet is discussed in more detail on our philosophy page.
I am, I will admit, sadly inadequate when it comes to security. I'm not a hacker (in either the white hat or black hat sense) and never have been, and have little exposure to the rigors of security testing, as any system administrator who's worked with me can attest. So I'm looking forward to the ISECOM Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual. "As a professional standard, it includes the rules of engagement, the ethics for the professional tester, the legalities of security testing, and a comprehensive set of the tests themselves." We'll see.
Been keeping track of the Eolas vs. Microsoft judgement? The one where Microsoft was actually slapped with a judgement worth half a BILLION dollars? It concerns you, you know. Eolas claims to have invented plugins, and Microsoft is talking about modifying IE to account for the judgement.
I commented on original judgement and prior art issues over on my InformIT XML blog.
You can't see it yet, but next Friday, InformIT will be running an interesting article on the history of distributed computing. It starts with the hypothesis of "thinking machines" in the 1940's and comes up to today's grid systems. An interesting hypothesis: that PDAs will, someday soon, form themselves into a giant network.
I understand that most people blog about things they've read and found interesting. Half the time I feel like this blog is about pages I wish I had time to read. Amplifying Cognition - Extending Memory and Intelligence looks fascinating, and one day I'll have time to finish it. In the meantime, it's got a terrific quote:
"We are smart enough to realize we are stupid, and stupid enough to make the problem of becoming smarter hard." -- Anders Sandberg
(Credit where credit is due: I found this quote in XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web. You can actually read the book online, too.)
Shamless plug alert. I've been featured on the developerWorks home page! My tutorials usually wind up there, but they don't usually mention me by name. Understanding DOM isn't changed too much from it's original form, but Understanding SAX is practically a whole new tutorial.
Some items to think about adding to my InformIT XML Reference Guide blog:
The future of XML documents and relational databases
Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): Structure and Vocabularies has a new working draft
The W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange
of XML Information Item Sets
Microsoft Brings Secure Web Services Closer
Sun proposes new Web services specs
XHTML: Three Namespaces or One?
Extending RSS
XHTML Print Working Draft
Tim Bray on Resources
And maybe for this one:
Married to the (Mob)log?
Some movement in the case of Leonard Peltier
Neo-Conned
Backlash Predicted in File-Swapping Wars
Republican Lobbyist to Head RIAA
Now on IBM developerWorks: Understanding SAX (Tutorial) -- This tutorial examines the use of the Simple API for XML version 2.0.x, or SAX 2.0.x. It is aimed at developers who have an understanding of XML and wish to learn this lightweight, event-based API for working with XML data. It assumes that you are familiar with concepts such as well-formedness and the tag-like nature of an XML document. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use SAX to retreive, manipulate, and output XML data.
Now in IBM developerWorks: Understanding DOM (Tutorial) -- Even before there was XML, there was the Document Object Model, or DOM. It allows a developer to refer to, retrieve, and change items within an XML structure, and is essential to working with XML. In this tutorial, you will learn about the structure of a DOM document. You will also learn how to use Java technology to create a Document from an XML file, make changes to it, and retrieve the output.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around XML Digital Signatures. This article from MSDN is close, but my eyes are still glazing over before I get to the end.
In an interview with the New York Times, Bill Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that five percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice a day." Interestingly, in the same interview, Gates "said the company was considering the possibility of charging for some of its software updates that are now made available free over the Internet."
Don't know how much longer I'll be using Blogger. (Probably until I have time to find something else with comment support, which, with my schedule, could be years.) But I'm really interested in looking into Trackback.
Some items I don't have time to comment on right now:
The failed promise of email
Backup data on the moon
Turing Test Dead End
US names the day for biometric passports
One US.gov smartcard ID to fit all
Snags hold up biometrics, experts say
Now the question is, once print-on-demand really comes into its own and anybody can write their own book, will the ability to mount an effective ad campaign replace the ability to write a good book? Just remember what we used to day about the web: "The great thing about the web is that anybody can have their own site. The bad thing about the web is that anybody can have their own site."
(And another note, on the economics of print-on-demand ...)
I'm sure there's some good information here, and if I can ever get more than five minutes to read it, I may actually absorb some of it. It's about stigmergy, which "is a communication strategy used by ants to tell each other where to find sources of food. This same strategy can be used on a Web site site to induce people to cooperate and collaborate in the sharing of information."
When people find out I write books, they think I must be rich. HA! If only! Check out The economics of writing a computer trade book to understand why you (usually) won't get rich doing this. And while we're on the subject, you know those books that show up under "Used and New" on Amazon? Don't buy them, folks. Yes, they're cheaper. Wanna know why? Because with very few exceptions, they're publisher's remainders. That means that the author didn't get a penny for them. Not one red cent.
Apparently you don't have to have thousands of dollars to build a real live robot, complete with not only movement, but also speech recognition. You just have to know Java.
I'm astounded. I tried Netscape 6 when it was out and was tremendously disappointed at how ponderously slow it was, so it was a little bit of a struggle to get me to try again. But I was reading Tim Bray's call-to-action, of sorts, and decided to try again. Man, I'm glad I did. I'm currently using Mozilla 1.4, and I cannot believe how much faster it is than IE 6! Do yourself a favor and give it a shot.
My wife gets quite aggravated over those popups and ads that look like system error messages. You know the ones, telling you your system isn't optimized, or you have a message waiting. Finally someone's filed suit against Doubleclick, the advertising network on which these ads run. Not sure how this is going to fly. First of all, they want to make it a class-action suit, with damages of $500 per person and $5.00 per incident for anyone who's encountered these ads. Well, that's just about all of us, methinks, but it'd be difficult to prove. Second, did Doubleclick actually create the banners, or just run them?
I'll be happy if the court simply agrees to force Doubleclick to stop running the darn things, but the real gold here is if they can get Doubleclick to stop tracking what pages users view.
But that's a whole different ballgame.
And while we're on the subject of blogging, here's an interesting article about Googlebombing. That's when people get together and decide that they're all going to link to the same page with the same phrase, in the hopes of increasing the page's rank in Google. For example, that link will help Microcontent News's article rise in the ranks for the keyword "Googlebombing".
The interesting thing here is how the net is almost like a living organism, adapting to its environment. I mean, search engines come around and try to present meaningful results based on the page's content, so page authors adapt their page content to score higher. So Google comes around and ranks pages based on what other people do, supposedly taking it out of your hands and providing better results. Then page authors figure out how to manipulate that. (And sometimes it's much more nefarious. See Operation Clambake's discussion of the Church of Scientology and the possiblity that they've purchased a bunch of domains so they can link to each other and direct searches to sites that present a favorable view.) So what will Google do to adapt? And what will page authors do to adapt to that?
Alexander Payne answered my FOAF question. Thanks, Alex. I guess I'll let you live. For now. Now I've just got to figure out how to put my own together....
Gotta remember to check out the last call for the Cascading Style Sheets 3 Basic User Interface Module.
I've been having some difficulty with my hard drive lately. As long as I don't have to shut down my machine, it's fine, but if I do, it takes several tries for it to recognize the drive again. Could it be the fact that I installed Windows 2003 on a spare partition? Interestingly, I didn't start to have a problem until I started to actually use it. (And until I installed Office 2003. Hm.) Now I'm back in 2000 -- the 2003 partition is impossible to boot -- but I'm worried about that drive. Maybe it's fate that Morris Rosenthal just let everyone know about the troubleshooting poster he's got online.
I hate sensationalist claims, particularly when they distort the truth. The EFF (with which I normally agree) has managed to get the Ninth Circiut court of appeals to withdraw an opinion that "framing" of content (or "inline linking") is copyright infringement. That's when Site A takes content from Site B and embeds it in a page or frameset in such a way that it looks like the content is coming from Site A and not Site B. So don't believe the hype that the ruling "that threatens to make all linking on the World Wide Web a copyright infringement," as the EFF claims.
Big Dave needs a kidney. I don't know Dave Johnson. Never met him, never even heard of him before today. But he's dying, and so are thousands of other people. Ever considered being an organ donor? You don't have to be brain dead to do it anymore. Check out LivingDonors.com for info on donating a kidney. (Dave's insurance would cover all your expenses.)
I'm registered as a potential marrow donor. Are you?
Adam Curry has a point. With all of this hassle over RSS, is anybody listening to the customer? Even more scary, though, are his comments about marketing: "But I don't care about the technology of it all, I'm a marketing guy. I spent years promoting rss and see no benefit as a user to have to go through the entire process of validation again, nor do I look forward to 'fixing' all those rss and xml icons and links. This is destructive to the architecture already in place imho. The inability to create a descriptive useful name already shows a lack of marketing savvy. Where are the docs explaining the big advantages to me as a user/writer/publisher/reader/subscriber? Isn't is just more of the same?"
Why is this scary to me? Because the BigCo's everyone keeps screaming about can be very, very good at marketing.
I kind of wish everyone would just get together and say, "hey, let's just unfreeze 2.0, make the necessary changes to solve these problems, and be done with it." But I'm not naive enough to think that'd work.
I've had Google's Adsense running over at The Vanguard Science Fiction Report for a week now, and I've made $1.56, and that's just because I wanted to see what sites were advertising on mine. I may give BlogAds a try instead. Or maybe I'll buy one. I'll let you know how it goes either way.